Contains: Island of Sheep, Three Hostages, Mr Hostages, Mr Standfast, The 39 Steps.

Richard Hannay is the most famous creation of author and diplomat John Buchan. Hannay can be seen to be the first true action hero of British literature, a decorated soldier and spy, constantly needed by the government to thwart plots against the empire. Here collected are the first three novels to contain Richard Hannay.

I returned from the City about three o'clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life. I had been three months in the Old Country, and was fed up with it. If anyone had told me a year ago that I would have been feeling like that I should have laughed at him; but there was the fact. The weather made me liverish, the talk of the ordinary Englishman made me sick, I couldn't get enough exercise, and the amusements of London seemed as flat as soda-water that has been standing in the sun. 'Richard Hannay, ' I kept telling myself, 'you have got into the wrong ditch, my friend, and you had better climb out.' It made me bite my lips to think of the plans I had been building up those last years in Bulawayo. I had got my pile-not one of the big ones, but good enough for me; and I had figured out all kinds of ways of enjoying myself. My father had brought me out from Scotland at the age of six, and I had never been home since; so England was a sort of Arabian Nights to me, and I counted on stopping there for the rest of my days.

Major General Sir Richard Hannay is a fictional secret agent created by Scottish novelist John Buchan and made further popular by the 1935 Alfred Hitchcock film The 39 Steps. Buchan's resourceful, German-speaking spy is partly based on Edmund Ironside, from Edinburgh, an espionage operative during the Second Boer War. The Richard Hannay Collection - The 39 Steps, Greenmantle and Mr Standfast presents the first and best three Richard Hannay adventures: The Thirty Nine Steps Hannay arrives in London on the eve of World War I, where he meets an American agent seeking help in stopping a political assassination. Before long, Hannay finds himself in possession of a little black book that holds the key to the conspiracy - and on the run from both the police and members of a mysterious organization that will stop at nothing to keep their secrets hidden. Greenmantle Hannay is called in to investigate rumors of an uprising in the Muslim world, and undertakes a perilous journey through enemy territory to meet his friend Sandy in Constantinople. Once there, he and his friends must thwart the Germans' plans to use religion to help them win the war, climaxing at the battle of Erzurum. Mr Standfast Recalled from duty on the Western Front by spymaster Sir Walter Bullivant, Hannay goes undercover as a pacifist, working to outwit a dangerous German spy and his agents. Guided by his contact-and love interest-Mary Lamington, Hannay tracks his enemy from London to Glasgow to the Scottish Highlands, eventually confronting him in a dramatic climax above the battlefields of Europe. The title refers to a character in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, to which there are many other references in the novel; Hannay uses a copy of Pilgrim's Progress to decipher coded messages from his contacts, and letters from his friend Peter Pienaar.